Nationwide, 48 counties have been awarded the top ranking from Standard & Poor's Ratings Services, a grade that means the county will be able to borrow money at a lower interest rate.

*Lockheed Martin chief executive Robert Stevens told U.S. allies in Europe they must invest more in their local defense industry or risk an "unbridgeable" gap that will make it hard for companies to work together across the Atlantic.

U.S. defense spending continues at rates approaching 4 percent of gross domestic product, Stevens told the Security and Defence Agenda Conference on NATO in the Next Decade in Brussels. That's twice as much as Europeans spend on procurement and about six times as much on research.

Six countries provide 80 percent of Europe's defense investments and "very few" members of NATO meet the requirement of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, he said.

*Affiliated Computer Services said it completed its $42 million purchase of Transportation Management Systems, which provides GPS-based fleet-management systems. The all-cash deal for TMS, a unit of Dulles-based Orbital Sciences, was announced April 17.

TMS technology is used by more than 60 state, regional and local transit agency customers, in more than 30 percent of the fleets in the U.S. and Canada.